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It’s been a frustrating week for knitting. I have a mild tendonitis inside my right elbow—too much copy and paste at work—so knitting has been limited. I did a bit of work on the gravevine scarf, but ran into a few problems.

Some people might look at the two halves of the scarf here and think that not having the color patterns match would be a problem, but that’s not the problem. It would have been nice if they matched better, but that isn’t insurmountable. A scarf, after all is usually wrapped around the neck, not hung for full-length display.

No, the real problem is with the stitch pattern itself. The main body of Barbara Walker’s pattern* is fine, but the edges as written do not match.

The pattern consists of a twelve-row repeat with the second six rows mirroring the first. And it does, except for the edges and, strangely, the stitich count. Rows 6 and 7 have one more stitch than rows 12 and 1. The left edge has couple of yarnovers, the right does not. The left lies flatter than the right, which has a scalloped, almost cabled effect and a definite tendency to curl toward the back. It seems to me that the lack of symmetry could be a problem in a knitted garment.

Why did I knit more than half a scarf with what I think is a flawed pattern? First, it didn’t occur to me until well into the first half. Second, the difference was much more pronounced in the more rapid color changes of the second ball.

I altered the pattern to mirror the left edge on the right and changed my selvage to get the fabric to lie flatter. I frogged the second half of the scarf and re-knit it, which you can see in the left-hand piece in the top photo. I’m frogging the first half too. I’ll knit about 15” in the current ball and switch to the other to knit to the middle, then re-knit the other half the same way. That way the ends will have the more varied colors.

I intentionally did not knit alternating the two balls. I wanted the pooling. I just hoped it would be closer.

I also reworked the pattern to mirror the right scallop on the left and ended up with one less stitch per round. Ms. Walker’s original, though it calls for a multiple of eight stitches plus six, has an eight-stitch repeat with fourteen edge stitches. The variation I used has an eight-stitch repeat with six edge stitches. My second variant has an eight-stitch repeat with thirteen edge stitches.

* Gravevine Pattern, A Treasury of Knitting Patterns, p. 220. The edges are clearly different in the illustration. The Trellis Grapevine on the following page has the same edge issue.